«سَبَعْ مَنَاخِلْ وِالقَش دَاخِلْ»

The saying pictures someone running flour through sieve after sieve while bran and stray bits of stalk, which sifting should remove, keep slipping back in. All that sifting fails because it is done carelessly, so the flour is no cleaner than before. Repeating a task many times means little if it is never done properly.

In use, it mocks effort that looks thorough but achieves nothing because it lacks care and precision; the fault lies in the carelessness, not in sieves or repeated checking. It suits moments when people defend poor results by listing how many steps, checks, or attempts they made, reminding them that quality matters more than quantity.

Use it when someone points to how much work went into something that still came out flawed, such as a document revised many times that keeps its errors. It criticizes effort without care and can sound sharp if aimed directly at a person.